Really Simple Systems: Making CRM simple

Sally Dickson

Abstract5 behaviours you should adopt to make the most of your new Customer Relationship

Management system.

How to use a CRM systemIf you’ve never used a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system before then to get the most from it you’ll probably need to change the way you work.

If today you have all your customers’ details in your emails system, i.e. Microsoft Outlook or just a big spreadsheet with all the names of your prospects in it. You probably feel overwhelmed and disorganised. Don’t worry you’re in good company. Most users of Really Simple Systems are first time CRM customers.

Your new Customer Relationship Management System offers greater efficiencies when find all the emails, documents and telephone conversations you have had, and keeping track of them in one easy to reference scree. That is what a CRM does.

In addition these following five changes in behaviours will ensure you get the most from your Customer Relationship Management System:

Start with Customer Segmentation Move to being Task Driven Define and Qualify your Opportunities Start Mass Marketing to Non Customer Monitor your sales and marketing activity and generate reports

The following guidelines and advice are distilled from many years of working with CRM customers and apply to any CRM system, not just Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM.

Change # 1. Start with Customer SegmentationIf you have a lot of customer data, now is the time to segment your customers and also perhaps allocate them amongst the members of your team, if there is more than one of you.

It makes sense to work out how you’re going to segment your data before you load it, otherwise you’ll have to change the data again, but you might want to enter a few records to get the feel of it.

Segmentation: Important vs. Secondary, use AccountsYou should review your list of customers and decide which ones are important and which are secondary. You can then allocate them between yourself and your team members.

In Really Simple CRM: the free trials allows you set up two users, yourself and one other, this allows you to allocated some accounts to yourself, and some to another member of staff, but you could also use the two user names to focus on the most important, and then the secondary accounts.

Go to Accounts tab you can choose to see just “My Accounts” or “All Accounts”.

Segmentation: Customers vs Prospects: use Account TypeAn important part of segmentation is differentiating between existing customers and prospects where you hope they will become customers.

In Really Simple CRM: You can distinguish between customer and prospects by using the Account Type field. That will make it easier to search for your prospects. You don’t have to stick with the default options in the drop-down box, you can create your own by editing the lookup table that drives that field. That’s under the Set Up tab / Manage Lookup Tables / AccountType. Some people use “Suspects” to distinguish people that you aren’t actively engaged with, “Hot Prospects” for those you hope to close soon.

Segmentation: Live customer vs fans and followers, use Dummy UsersIn your customer list you may also have customers who are journalists, followers, fans and others. You may wish to further segment your customer database to distinguish these groups.

If you need further segmentation, you can set up further ‘dummy users’, you can set the names of ‘dummy users’ as Journalists, Followers, General.

In Really Simple CRM: With the Free version you can add up to 100 accounts and unlimited contacts. You may have an unlimited number of dummy users (i.e. non-live users) for the purposes of segmentation in the Really Simple Free Trial.

If you have more than 100 Accounts you may wish to upgrade to Premium version, where the pay as you go pricing ensures you only pay for what you need, start at £5/month for 200 accounts.

If you have more than 2000 accounts you may wish to upgrade to Enterprise for unlimited accounts and unlimited contacts. Enterprise costs £35/user /month.

Change # 2. Move to being Task DrivenYou have now segmented your data and uploaded all of your contacts, and most particularly you have identified your prospects. Now is the time to become task orientated.

Take some time to work through your list of prospects and write up a task against each one. Even if it is only to chase in six months’ time. These tasks will now start to appear as you log-on to your CRM system and remind you of the most urgent activities you have previously identified for growing sales.

Role based tasksIf you are a larger company with more accounts, you may also consider Role Permissions so staff only see the tasks and actions linked to their own accounts. For small organisations, it is normal to allow all users read and write access to all Accounts. For larger organisations, you may want to allow each sales person to have Write access to their own Accounts, Read access to those in their User Group and no access to other Accounts. Sales Managers would be then have their own User Profile that would allow them Read & Write access to all Accounts in their User Group, and Read access only to all other Accounts.

In Really Simple CRM:

In the free trial you can add tasks for all your 100 accounts. Role Based Permissions is available for Premium customers at a cost of

£5/user/month.

Role Based Permissions is free for Enterprise customers.

Change # 3 Define and qualify your Opportunities

Opportunities are deals you hope to close. With your list of prospects in place, you can add in for each customer an opportunity, a sale you hope to make, the value of that sales and a percentage to indicate the chance of you making that sale.

You have now qualified your prospect and you can set up an Opportunity with an estimated close date and value. If you don’t have a feel for the close date or value – it’s not qualified!

In the Really Simple Free Trial, you will find the full opportunities functionality, including a list of all opportunities, a sales funnel illustration on the home page and you can also create a report of the Sales opportunities in Reporting.

In Really Simple CRM:

Sales Forecasts are not available in the Free Trial Sales Forecasts can be added to the Premium edition at a cost of £10 a month. In Enterprise Sales Forecasts are included free of charge.

Change # 4 Start Mass Marketing

If you have thousands of Accounts then it is impractical to set up a Task or assign an opportunity for each one. Set the Account Type to “Suspect” (as in, pre-Prospect) and allocate them to a User called Marketing. Then you can market to them using email or snail-mail.

The Really Simple Marketing provided unlimited email marketing and campaign management with customer responses to emails being linked directly to their accounts.

Marketing is only available to Premium and Enterprise customers. It gives It costs £35 per month. When you expand to five Enterprise users then the marketing module is free.

Change # 5: Monitor your sales and marketing activity and generate reportsOnce you’ve got the system sorted out, you can think about running some reports, for instance:

Activity Reports. Customers Lists Customers and segments lists

Really Simple CRM: the free trial will provide you an activities log to track all your interactions with your customers and a large number of reports set up as standard.

The Premium and Enterprise versions also offer Mail Sync, which automatically captures all of your emails to and from the customers from your existing email service.

Mail sync costs £5/user/month for Premium customers. Mail Sync is free to Enterprise customers who pay £35/user /month

Advanced Reporting option is available with our Premium and Enterprise Editions, it will show all your prospects who haven’t been contacted, or who don’t have tasks set up against them.

In Summary: Customer Relationship Management - a new way of workingNow that you have your data loaded into your CRM, you have clear segments and with tasks set up against all your active prospects, so you can let the system take over.

Every day you’ll have a list of tasks. Make the calls/send the email/go to the meeting. Write up the call notes (we call them Activities), adjust the opportunity if it has moved, set up a task for the next action for that prospect.

Now you’re organised!